What’s in a Name?

We’ve been hanging out with the Hong Kong Homeless Football Team for nearly nine months now. We can safely say we know everyone pretty well. So it came as a bit of a surprise on Sunday, when Wai Tung handed out a specially prepared booklet about the team, featuring members like Justin and Peter, Vegas and Winson.

Just who were these guys? We’d never heard of them before. As far as we were aware, the team had players like Ah Lung and Ah Hung, Chu Ba and Ah Seng. Members with very traditional Chinese names.

And then it all came clear. Ah Lung (or rather, Justin) told us he had been instructed to pick an English name by social workers in charge of putting together the booklet. They felt it was important for the team to have less exotic names so that they would be able to make new friends and meet more people at the Homeless World Cup in Cape Town next week.